Time again to wrap up another year and trying to peer forward into what’s coming in the next. A year ago, I looked forward to attending more conventions and had fears that I would only be able to attend two due to budget restrictions. Thankfully I was wrong, thanks to the support of Patreon members and generous invitations I made it to PAGE, Gary Con, Bergin Man and Gamehole Con. It is such a treat to spend time with gamers, run games and attend and run seminars, and this year I’ve ran games at all the conventions I attended in addition to a lot of online sessions. Online conventions like Virtual Greyhawk Con are also a treat 2026 looks even more promising with a possible five conventions
My Patreon had its second overhaul in 2024. I’ve ben on Patreon since 2017 and only overhauled it once and that was back in 2019 when changed from being a generic cartography Patreon, to one focused way more on Greyhawk and letting the technique behind my cartography playing more of a supporting role. The growth has been slow but steady, which I’m very grateful for, you keep supporting me by making my type of long projects possible.
The now venerable Greyhawk maps will see one last hurrah in 2026, a series of maps for printing. My plan is a series of 24 x 36 inch maps covering the Flanaess and Hepmonaland. The 1:200,000 series of maps I did this year was geared towards digital use, this new series will have larger symbols and text labels to be legible when printed at the correct size, and 24 x36 inch is a good compromise I think, it can be printed at almost any print shop at reasonable rates. Larger prints become both way more expensive and it is harder to find printers that can handle them properly.
After this it is time to retire these old maps and concentrate work on creating a new generation. Never could I have guessed how much use would come out of my old Bryce based maps back in the 1990’s when I started work on them. I’ve improved them almost every year with additions and corrections, added Hepmonaland and took half a year to go over the terrain in Photoshop to improve the garish 90’s colors. I didn’t have color corrected screens back then, and not much knowledge in how to use Photoshop either for that matter. But it gave the old map a new lease of life and its still being used by thousands of players, DM’s, appearing in fanzines and in products on DM’s guild.
Last year I wrote about software troubles and frustrations, and they are still here and World Machine 3 have been my go-to tool for most of this year. Now at the end of 2025 there is finally a new era emerging with new versions of both World Machine and Gaea planned to be released in 2026. Gaea 3 is looking especially promising with lots of goodies I’ve been wanting for a long time, god-mode, meandering rivers and massive parallel computing as well as vector displacement, which the new world Machine has as well. God-Mode is Gaea’s name for massive, tiled worlds which seems to be an improvement to how WM has handled large builds so far. Together with reivers and the ability to process vastly more data effectively means doing things faster with batter results. New code base has finally let the CPU and GPU work on that they do best at the same time while using better memory management.
Game engines like Unreal shows similar progress with much improved handling of really large landscapes full of vegetation and other object, even many billions of them. 30 years ago, I gambled that Moore’s Law would save me, making it possible to create my first generation Greyhawk maps. Now I’m making a similar gamble to do it all over again but in much more detail. Back then it was raw processing power improvements that carried the day, this time I’m foreseeing more of a combination of increased processing power paired with more memory, but crucially better software is where a lot of improved will come from this time.
I will finish the Shield Lands and its surroundings using World Machine, both in a commission version for the new Melf’s Guide and in public version for you guys. In the meantime I will test the new versions, which I will have early access to, and hopefully they offer enough improvement that a new approach going forward is warranted. That doesn’t mean what I’ve done so far is in vain, it will be imported back into Gaea (or what the new version of WM will be called, if that is what I will be using) and improved upon. For the first time in a decade, I’m really hopeful that a new generation of tolls is coming!
This is a long overdue project that I started in 2025, and then it got sidelined a bit when I got commissioned to both work on the maps for the Melf’s Guide and Gamehole Publishing map for their organized play campaign. I had to drop something and Sources what got to be temporarily shelved. I want to emphasize temporarily; it is a very useful exercise for me to go over every label on the current map and find out how it got there. A big part in my goal to improve what I do!
Just like the world at large, which is in a lot of change, our beloved hobby is too. From a new regime at WotC to the fact that TTRPG’s have now firmly expanded into the mainstream to another aspect that is shaping it, and I’m thinking of the fact that the hobby is now half a century old and we have gamers of every age group. Roleplaying was once a thing that young nerds did, now it is a thing anyone can do, and that shows in diversity in what games are being played, how they are being played and by who. I see this as a huge strength that proves how great a thing collective cooperative story telling is.
A new regime at WotC happens every decade or so, last time it happened we go a pivot to digital, One D&D the death of the settings and investor fever dreams. What will happen this time is too early to tell but a few hints are emerging. WotC’s interest in community seems to be coming back, and after a decade of crunch with rules being the focus of their business, my guess is that fluff, the stories and the IP behind it might have a renaissance. Another force behind this transformation that I have talked about before is that when you digitize rules, changing them brings out cost rather than income, and reprogram D&D Beyond with new feats doesn’t bring in a lot of new revenue, it costs money.
A long term prediction I have around this is that WotC is going to pivot towards becoming a platform operator, like becoming the Steam of the TTRPG world, where you want to go to publish your games and content, regardless of game system. We are nowhere near that happening yet, but if you want to grow big and bring in a large amount of steady revenue, be the platform and let others do the work and siphon money off that. DM’s guilds success shows a bit of this, and WotC doesn’t own it, at least not yet. For this to happen another shift in mindset need to happen, for WotC to see themselves as a main custodian of the TTRPG world and realizing they can earn more by growing the overall size of it. I’m not sure this is a good thing, it is probably mixed. It is something I keep a look out for.
When it comes to Greyhawk, we are now back in the limelight again after more than two decades on the sidelines. How long that will be and what will come of it is too early to tell, Greyhawk’s role in the new DMG was to use it as a base for homebrewing. I liked that and its guest appearance along with the opening up of DM’s guild might have been the whole plan. It seems that Greyhawk was more popular than first expected, so the plan shifted to milk some more out it and Adventure’s Leage moved to Greyhawk at least for a while.
As a Greyhawk fan and creator, I’m both pleased and worried about this. For so long I’ve been working away in the shadows using the old material creating a library of resources for Greyhawk fans to use with that material. With a range of new stuff coming out there are both opportunities, my maps and heraldry are in a lot of stuff being published on DM’s guild, and more is in the making some with my direct involvement. On one side, this is super cool and a dream come true; I’m a full time Greyhawk creator. The other side of the coin is that commission work is working with others cutting corners to meet deadlines and designing by committee, less time to immerse myself deep into in my projects for as long as needed to make the best I can make. Working with others on projects is a good thing which I need to get better at, and have a lot to learn from, but I need to balance it to not burnout and maintaining inspiration.
5th Edition D&D have had a fantastically successful decade, but I think its days as the hegemon of the hobby are numbered for two reasons. It is no longer the new cool thing and a lot of players who played it because it was new and cool will move on, a lot of them to something completely different not roleplaying related. Others who have fallen in love with the hobby will try other games, new and old to see what they like the most, this will fuel both the OSR movement for a while longer as well as support a lot of new games. 5E will survive and become a permanent part of our hobby and D&D, but it will not be the undisputed leader for much longer is my prediction.
I made the decision to change the Creative Commons license from CC -BY -NC -SA to CC -BY meaning you can use my Greyhawk stuff for anything including commercial publishing, the only thing required are to refer to me as the source. My reasons for this are that D&D SRD are now published under this license, and even more importantly I wanted my stuff to be usable on DM’s Guild with no hassle. This goes hand in hand with how I see my role as a creator, a resource provider, providing resources to be used as they are or altered to improve in other people’s games, streams or published content.
This approach is important as an alternative to the commercialization being found everywhere, subscriptions and paywalls are everywhere. As a liberal I’m a believer in capitalism, but there are different ways to go about things. Relying on donations is also a great way to keep overhead low, no sales costs, advertising takes care of itself, piracy is not a thing I need to worry that much about. When I have sent messages to seller on Esty and Amazon who sells prints of my maps and heraldry to please include the part where my name and url are mentioned, the stop selling my maps.
This ties into physical stuff, prints and merch, something I have done my best to stay out due to the costs and time involved. I had a collaboration with Noble Dwarf to prints maps and heraldry, which was hopeful but never took off. Mainly my fault since it was a bit premature, my maps where not well suited for prints and I should have insisted on them to hold off until I had the right maps to be printed. What we got was prints reduced in size and even edited to substandard quality to fit a certain print size. This has been a consistent struggle between me and printers, and I know a fair bit about how printing is done. It was my first job back when I started gaming, and I even jumped in and helped a friend of mine here in SoCal who owns and runs a printing company.
Enough complaining, let’s look forward and try to improve things! My current map is not a good fit for printing, and that is something I’m going to try and fix in 2026 with a new series of maps for print. The question then becomes how to organize prints, one way is to just provide the pdf’s and let folks take care of the rest, or should I try and find a printing partner that can handle prints and the logistics around it. This is not a money thing for me; I don’t expect to earn anything but on the other hand I don’t have the time or money to handle it myself. I’m very open to ideas on how to best do this.
I’ve printed a few T-shirts with my logo that I wear at conventions, and I often get the question of where they can get one. My answer used to be Noble Dwarf who printed a some, but now they seem to have gone defunct so now I need to have another solution. Something more stable and which gives me a bit more control since it is my logo on stuff. This is also a task for 2026.
Getting my stuff to you guys effectively is an ongoing struggle, big files are not what the Internet was built to handle. Download managers make it possible, but it is an annoyance that they are needed. Notion is in many ways a better content delivery platform, for now at least. It was not really bult to distribute big files, but it works well, things are searchable and it handles downloading rather well. My skeptical nature tells me Notion work so well because they are still in the phase of building a userbase, which means offer a premium experience to attract more users. Sooner or later, they will have hit their limits and then their mission will be to squeeze a profit out of each user and then bandwidth will be at a premium, but for a while longer I think it can be a useful service to manage my content.
The next GIS project after my print version of my old maps will be to set up a test Geoserver. The first step will be to convert an old desktop of mine into a Linux server and run a Geoserver on it to test out the tech. The end goal is to provide a kind of Greyhawk version of OpenStreetMap, the ability to use my Greyhawk related maps in a browser and directly in QGIS without having to download massive files. Again a base service intended to be built upon, for DM’s to make their own maps on top of. I want to use it inside my Obsidian.md campaign vault as a map that I can place pins and markers on while adventuring.
As an alternative to streaming the data, I want to set up a cloud service for those of you who want access to all the raw data, heightmaps, mask textures and so on. This is terabytes of data so it can’t be openly distributed on the internet. It will be a select set of my Patreons who are on my top tier who will get access to this service, the kitchen sink! I’m looking into what service to use for this, a strong candidate is Syncthing but there are others, paid or open source.
My little side hobby turned out to be very popular, and so far, I have done 471 shields and symbols. Recreated all the exiting Greyhawk heraldry I have found and then added a bunch of my own design to the collection. There are still more to do, Iuzian henchmen, various actors and factions from Ivid the Undying. My take on Furyondy is in the making with all its baronies, in my Furyondy the provinces have been reconstituted into proper earldoms, counties and arch-baronies, each of them consisting of several baronies.
Heraldry is fun and can be done in hours, for the most part. At times I found myself going down a rabbit hole, only to realize I spent pouring over old Greyhawk notes for hours trying to find out more about Gorsend or something.
Another side hobby that have taken on a life way bigger than I initially imagined. It grew out of my habit house ruling 3rd Edition and Pathfinder 1st Edition for nearly 20 years, and when D&D Next, Level Up A5E and PF2 was coming out started to realize that it was time for me to take the plunge and start creating a version of fantasy role playing rules that would work well at my table. The rise of 5E and it becoming Creative Commons made me decide to use 5E and A5E as the base to work from, to keep compatibility.
Now years later and after nearly 100 sessions of play online and at conventions, a system standing on its own has emerged. Nuanced, slightly tactical, multilayered, player managed and surprisingly fast paced even at high level. This are the positives I take from the first Alpha version played over the last two years. Pain points are high numbers that should be brought down for even faster play, and more streamlined way to handle armor and its hardness. Reducing the effort needed to handles the things opens up for more damage and drain types, and plans for an tier of epic play. I want rules that handles everything from humble beginnings as villagers struggling to handle everyday life, to arch mages and champions of righteousness able to take on the powers of the world and beyond.
30 levels of progression and the Divine Tiers for those with even higher ambitions. The Divine tiers are mostly intended as a way to handle how powerful beings are created and how they interact with the world, but nothing stopping a GM to allow that for players to use as well. In my campaign I intend to use that to handle the powers of religious factions, sect and their patron powers, both collectively and individually. This is where Domain and Pact magic comes from, so as player characters grow in power and rely on this power they are part of the system, I want the GM to have tools to use when playing that out.
My plan for next year is to start running playtest session using Alpha 2 version of the rules, first out will be PAGE in two weeks. Later this spring I want to make a first public version of the playtest rules available in markdown and simple pdf. Not the full rules, but low and mid-level play hopefully up to 10th level. The main thing to limit this are spells, it takes a lot of time to re-edit spells and currently I have 345 spells to go over. Key bits are things like healing and resurrection which I have tweaked quite a bit from the first playtests when I wrote the current versions. Monsters are another important bit that takes a lot of time, currently I have about 40 monsters and generic NPC’s that I have used so far whose statblocks need to be updated. Making monsters is fun but time consuming but seeing them in action in the next play session makes it all worth it.
Never thought I would be into game design, but after playing for over 40 years I now know what I need for my games and have the experience to try and create that tool set. I don’t think Hawk Tales FRP will be a widespread success, I’m designing it to be a good ruleset for the type of games I want to run, gritty sandboxes with long term play and lots of world interactions. Rules that know their place, in the background making things keep happening and guides the action, provide options and inspiration. Not by being fancy and cool, but by just making it happen.
Working on my own rule set has forced me to analyze my own play, and what I want out of it, very rewarding. Thank you all who have participated in playtesting and giving me feedback and advice!
My mapping streams on Fridays, co-hosting on the Lord Gosumba channel are a great way to reach out and interact with you guys, it takes a few hours every week, and it is well worth it, it is both community building and advertising at the same time. I’m going to have more private streams and workshops in 2026, so keep a lookout for those.
Thank You!
Thank you so much for your continuing support, it means everything to me. I wish you all a Happy New Year!
